Diplomatic Relations
A lokaneweek fic
Prompts: Redemption, Jealousy, Ire/Fighting, Obliviousness, Denials, and Epiphanies
From across the library, Loki watched them.
Askara agreed with Jane. Something about the light of binary suns turned her hair to amber and her eyes to topaz. Her skin, clear and olive in the harshest of artificial lights, gleamed here like warm honey. Even Askaran fashion agreed with her, and those billowing robes flattered no one. Yet Jane seemed queenly in her high-necked majan, which flowed over her body like water, caressing every dip and curve.
All this should have been a sweetener to his drudgery, in giving him something to contemplate enjoying later. The fabric of her clothing would be soft as he parted it to find the softer skin beneath. Yet time and again, as he bent his head to focus on the tangled arithmantic calculations on his tablet, he found himself distracted by something far less enthralling.
If only the Askaran helping Jane were less...attractive.
Xe was a particularly well-made specimen of xyr species. With long limbs overlaid with feathery scales that displayed a waterfall of changeable colors from sweet pink to inky blue, and eyes blacker than the night sky, xe was a perfect example of a being Loki would have enjoyed dallying with himself, before Jane.
From the sprightly discussion and frequent bursts of laughter passing between them, Jane must be feeling the same way. She had raced to the library this morning, babbling something about a new take on string theory, and had left him before finishing breakfast. At the time, he had only chuckled at her eagerness for knowledge, but now...
Jane had so little experience with truly alien creatures—this was her first androgynous race—that Loki couldn't help feeling an acid drop of jealousy eating away at a tender place in his heart.
Well, if she meant to leave him, she would just have to live with the consequences. Askara was a backwater—a beautiful one, yes—but she would soon outgrow what the people here could give her. She would regret abandoning him.
Loki buried his nose and his wounded feelings back in his work, trying again to untangle his equations and only succeeding in tying them up into a thicket of Gordian knots. Frustrated, he tossed the tablet down with a clatter and stormed from the room.
"Forgive me, Jane," Veltranx said, xyr neck scales bristling with crimsoned agitation, "this was my fault. I have neglected your companion. I will go see what upsets him. You can continue now, unguided?"
"Of course," Jane nodded, "I think I understand your explanation of the calculations and how to program them into the simulator. But you shouldn't worry about Loki. He gets," she shrugged, "moody."
Veltranx shook xyr head, bulbous black eyes blinking rapidly. "My people pride xemselves on hospitality. Though Loki has been among us before, I should not have neglected him. My pardon," xe bowed.
Jane returned the gesture and watched as Veltranx glided from the library, toe claws clicking on the polished stone floor. Alone then, she turned her focus to the simulator and tried to input her new algorithm for calculating the specific relationship between bosuns and fermions. The possibilities of the Askaran method of measurement for these two particles had fired Jane's brain all night. If she could quantify the precise coefficient between the two, that was one step closer towards...oh, hell, all kinds of things.
In a realistic, grounded sense, Jane might be the first person to objectively prove the super part of super-string theory. However...if Jane let her imagination have free rein, being able to manipulate bosuns and their corresponding fermions could be the first step on the path to transporter or replicator technology.
The thought made Jane's Star Trek-loving heart soar.
Jane, fingers shaking, tapped in the numbers to the simulator. An error message flashed up. Clearly, she hadn't understood Veltranx' explanation of the system's use as well as she'd thought.
Oh well. That was an easy fix. She put down her tablet and trotted out of the library.
Veltranx had caught Loki about halfway down the hallway. Jane opened her mouth to call to them, then pressed her lips together as she saw how they were standing. The two were in deep discussion, whispering soft and urgent, Loki's head turned in earnest contemplation of Veltranx. The Askaran's neck frill had turned violet, lilac streaks flashing from scale to scale in a brilliant display.
At the sight, an odd sensation twisted Jane's guts in a vicious fist; she hid behind a pillar and observed the two in silence.
Loki had been to Askara before. Jane had known that before they arrived. She also knew that Loki had...well, he had a lot of experience with other races. She'd known that too. But he hadn't even hinted at an intimate relationship with anyone on Askara.
Still, the possibility that she was watching Loki with one of his past lovers...
In Jane's case, jealousy flashed immediately into searing, white-hot anger. Her palm tingled and her fingers twitched. If she could have slapped him in that instant, she would have bruised her hand doing so. What she wouldn't do, though, was humiliate herself in front of the Askarans, who had been nothing but kind to her. Blinded by fury and a glaze of tears, she turned and groped her way back into the library.
How dare he? She'd never claimed to be anything other than a human—proud to be—and he knew that! If he wasn't interested, if he'd never really loved her...or worse, if he couldn't; if Jane, plain Jane, just couldn't hold his interest and had never even had a chance, she shuddered to imagine how blackened and frigid his heart must be, to pretend otherwise and to make her believe it.
Well, if she was just a smokescreen for him, if he was just going to use her to shield his indiscretions from Thor as he went about business-as-usual in the universe, she'd soon show him a thing or two!
Jane sniffed back her tears and locked them away. If her eyes burned brighter when Loki and Veltranx returned, neither of them remarked on it.
Dinner that night was a quiet affair. Jane kept a tablet propped on the serving bowl between herself and Loki, and the closest she came to him was to adjust the display to the next page of equations. Otherwise, her eyes were resolutely bent towards her plate and the fork that idly picked at her salad and its poached beetle croutons.
"Askaran cuisine does take some getting used to," Loki said, after watching her nudge aside the beetles for the third time, "They prefer food much fresher than most humans. If you spend time here, it's something you'll have to get used to."
"So you want to stay longer?" her lips twisted as though the words soured on her tongue.
"Don't you? You seemed very eager this morning to return to," he paused, "your work."
"What does that mean?"
"I think you know."
"I think I don't," despite her anger, Jane was starting to feel a little out of her depth. "Are you accusing me of something? Me?"
"I make no accusations," he frowned. "I only notice that you seem quite comfortable here. I was warning you that if you chose to stay, you would have to take the bad along with the good."
Confusion blanketed her anger and snuffed its flame.
"What are we talking about?"
Loki seemed as blank as she. "You and Veltranx."
"Me and Veltranx what? I met xyr when we arrived. In fact, I even liked xyr until I realized that you and xe had...a history." it was a knife in her chest to say, but Jane prided herself on only hesitating once even as the pain lanced her.
"Xe and me?" Loki snorted, shaking his head, "Xe's a child. Xe wasn't even hatched when I was here last."
Understanding was beginning to dawn on her. A flush of shame crept over her cheeks like rising sunlight. Loki didn't blush—she suspected he'd lost the ability centuries ago—but mortification made him go pale, and right then, he looked waxen as a corpse.
"You thought—" she swallowed, another emotion welling up inside, "and I thought—"
"Yes," he said, flat. "I think we did."
Jane couldn't help it. A croaking laugh burst from her throat as she slapped her palm on the table, honking like a duck.
And Loki, who hated laughing at himself and despised being the butt of a joke, joined her.